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2008: Top 300 Series of 2008

My 2008 rankings are based on 37 weeks of data (about 70% of the year) starting in late February and running (with minimal gaps) to the end of November, with a couple of charts right at the end to round out the year.

[Note: 801 Media & DMP June could be considered to be over-represented since each one-shot manga and novel counts as a single series. It would be more representative to look at some of their authors and mangaka as constituting a single series -- but I'm not doing that.]

801 Media 10

ADV 2

ADV/Tokyopop 1

Archie Comics 1

Aurora Deux 7

Bandai 1

Berkley 1

Boysenberry Books 1

Broccoli 1

Broccoli Books 3

CMX 1

Collins & Brown 1

Collins Design 2

Dark Horse 10

Dark Horse/DMP 1

Del Rey 26

DMP 2

DMP June 17

DMP/Seven Seas 1

DMP/Udon 1

First Second 1

Go! Comi 5

Graphic Sha 1

HarperCollins 2

HC/Tokyopop 3

HNA Amulet 1

Japan Publications Trading Co. 1

Japanime's Manga University 3

Last Gasp 1

Media Blasters 4

Netcomics 1

Oni Press 1

Palgrave Macmillan 2

Random House Doubleday Galilee 1

Random House Pantheon 1

Random House Villard 1

Seven Seas 5

Seven Seas Strawberry 2

Stone Bridge Press 1

Tokyopop 54

Tokyopop Blu 5

Tokyopop/Del Rey 1

Tokyopop/Simon & Schuster 1

Tyndale 1

Udon 1

Vertical 4

Viz 22

Viz Ghibli Library 2

Viz Shojo Beat 29

Viz Shonen Jump 17

Viz Shonen Jump Advanced 16

Viz Signature 4

Viz/ADV 1

Viz/Tokyopop 1

Vizkids 2

Watson-Guptill 1

Wiley, John & Sons 2

Yen Press 9

Series Rankings

Scores normalized to a 100 pt. scale (#1=100 points). (actually, the top score is 840539.5 points, which is harder to wrap your brain around, hence the extra calculation) It's a straight scalar, though, so all scores are still proportional.

And, let me stress, the scores are estimates. I like my method quite a bit, but am the first to admit I have to go through a hell of a lot of math making these estimates because I don't have access to actual unit sales numbers

Matt Blind is a bookseller: that's his day job, working as an asst. manager at a far-flung outpost of one of the big box chains. He is also a big fan of manga, has been a blogger of one stripe or another since aught-four, drinks too much, and remembers enough discrete math from his classes at Georgia Tech to construct the truly frightening spreadsheet that spits out these charts.

Matt maintains his own site at RocketBomber.com where he occasionally posts manga reviews, book retail & publishing news, and commentary on fandom in general -- but mostly wastes his time (and yours) with posts on the ever-changing variations and derivatives of these manga charts.

Readers with questions, comments or corrections should email Matt at, not surprisingly, matt[at]rocketbomber[dot]com.